Review: Intel Prescott Pentium 4 Processor

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The German strategist Helmut von Moltke once said, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

That adage is certainly true in the technology world. In Intel’s ideal world, the company would have had all the time it needed to tweak and perfect its 90nm process. Rumors over the last few months pointed to teething problems with the new process, including higher operating temperatures and power consumption than had been expected with Intel’s strained silicon process. The net result has been a somewhat restrained launch for Intel’s new progeny. Initial plans had called for launching the 3.4GHz CPU in quantity, but yields of 3.4GHz Prescotts have apparently been quite low. One of Intel’s biggest OEMs scaled back its system offerings to not include Prescott-based systems in one product category due to the lack of 3.4GHz Prescott availability.

On top of that, AMD has been on a roll. The recent release of the Athlon 64 3400+ proved to be a pleasant surprise, offering better performance gains than anticipated — a rarity these days. Sales of the new Athlon 64 line have propelled AMD to its first quarterly profit in over a year. Performance enthusiasts have been buzzing about AMD’s new flagship CPUs.

As we noted, Intel originally planned to launch its new 90nm Pentium 4 with a top clock rate of 3.4GHz. In fact, Intel may still paper launch at 3.4GHz, but only 3.2GHz and slower parts will be widely available. Supplies of the 3.4GHz Prescott will be “low,” and Intel will likely say so during its launch events.

To fill the gap, Intel is also launching a pair of new Pentium 4’s built around the older Northwood generation technology. One is a standard Northwood-based CPU, with 512KB of L2 cache, while the other will be an update to the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (dubbed by some pundits as the “Emergency Edition”). Like the first P4EE, the new chip sports 512KB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache. Both of the new/old CPUs will ship at 3.4GHz. All Prescott CPUs shipping on February 2nd will support Hyper-Threading and an 800MHz FSB (200MHz actual FSB clock, quad-pumped).

Intel supplied ExtremeTech with two processors: a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and a 3.2GHz Prescott CPU. Given that, it would be interesting to compare the performance of a 3.4GHz Northwood to Intel’s new baby. We sorely wanted to do this, but Intel was understandably reticent to hand out old-generation CPUs that might “distract” from the launch of their new architecture. However, we were able to obtain a 3.4GHz Northwood from another source, so we have performance data for a nearly complete suite of new CPUs to present — only the rare 3.4GHz Prescott is missing from the mix.

Before we get to the performance tests, though, let’s take a stroll through Prescott’s internal architecture. The new CPU is more than a die shrink, adding some significant architectural enhancements.

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